Wednesday, February 25, 2015

(Click on image to enlarge)Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society and Tom Rainford.

Rose is on the left. The other two are unidentified (although I'm wondering whether the girl on the right mightn't be her younger sister, Ida). Rose was born circa 1862, and in this photograph she looks about 17 years old.

The earliest record I can find of her is the 1870 Census, which shows Rose and Ida with their 36-year-old father, Jacob, a carpenter, and apparently a widower. Their home was in Plymouth, the county seat of Marshall County, Indiana. I can find no official record of Jacob in 1860, nor of his marriage or his wife's name. Notes appended to his name on findagrave.com state that his wife's name was Rebecca Gillis, that she died in 1868, and that they had lost a little daughter, Lucetta, in 1863.*

The 1880 Census shows the little Hendricks** household unchanged but for the addition of ten years. Unusually for that time, Jacob had not remarried. I don't know how he got through those early years after the death of his wife, with two small girls to care for. Those girls no doubt took on household responsibilities early. By 1880, Rose was 18 and Ida 16 — certainly old enough to manage the house for their father.

The loss of her mother had been the first great trouble of Rose's life. As we look at that 1880 census, the second great trouble of her life may have been already developing. We will get to that soon.

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*These notes may not be entirely reliable, as they give 1920 as the year of Rose's death, but the 1930 Census shows her still living.
**This is how the family originally spelled its surname, but the father of the three little Hendrixes changed the spelling because he was tired of getting mail addressed to another Hendricks living nearby. For my own convenience, I will be indexing everyone in this family under Hendrix.